We had a full house at Leytonstone Pop-Up Cinema last Wednesday for Henry Scott-Irvine’s brilliant documentary, Tales from Tin Pan Alley.

Henry Scott-Irvine introducing Tales from Tin Pan Alley

I first met Henry in the alley behind the 12 Bar Club on Denmark St while it was being occupied by musicians and protestors following its closure. I made a couple of videos about the campaigns to save live music venues in Soho and Denmark Street, some of the footage appears in Henry’s film. Tales from Tin Pan Alley, is far more than a protest film. It’s a documentary that tells the stories of the street of music from its Georgian heritage (with Dan Cruickshank) to its brief period as London’s ‘Little Tokyo’, to the place that gave us the pop charts. It’s an incredible story, brilliantly told in this absorbing and essential documentary.

In the Q&A afterwards, Henry passionately told the audience about the campaign to save Denmark Street’s music heritage. We were also joined by Jimmy Winston, one of the founder members of the Small Faces (formed in East Ham) who told me about coming to Leytonstone as a youth to look at the guitars in Friedman’s Guitar Shop on Leytonstone High Road. It was a memorable evening.

“The true ‘unsung heroes’ of Tin Pan Alley are the musicians, the songwriters, the music publishers, the technicians and the people from behind-the-scenes who have come out of the woodwork, out of history and out of retirement to approach us. Individuals that would be very hard to find in any other circumstance have come forward from across the globe, saying, ‘We want to be in this special documentary film!’

We have them here now. This is their story – a contemporary urban Canterbury Tale – a vital testament from over 30 musicians, broadcasters and historians.

In 2018 Tin Pan Alley’s 110 year old music legacy is currently in peril due to ensuing gentrification, leading to upcoming penthouse flats, hotels, restaurants and a shopping mall.

The legacy of those who worked in the street is our testament to Denmark Street’s unique place in international cultural history.

I’ve just launched a new blog of occasional writing on video culture, videography and film-making called Video Notes (the url is videographynotes because video notes was already taken). The first post explores how Jonas Mekas, ‘the godfather of the avant-garde’, could be seen as the original vlogger, and the parallels between the 1960’s experimental film scene in New York and contemporary online video culture. To be honest, I didn’t set out to write that post at all – I just wanted to explore the idea of diary films, but that is where the reading took me.

Mekas was one of the founders of the Film-makers’ Co-operative in New York in 1962. After writing the post I embarked on a crazed rummage through my notes and cuttings trying to find the brochure for the Tate retrospective screenings of the work of the London Film-makers’ Co-op entitled ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot’ from 2002 (Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative and British Avant Garde Film 1966-76). I didn’t find it but had fun looking. But it did lead me to find this brilliant collection of films from the London Film-makers’ Co-op free to view on the BFI player.

I’d had an awareness and interest in Jonas Mekas from my time working at the National Film Theatre (this was my film school). But it was when I was trying to work out what to do with the 4 hours of footage from the walks I did for my book This Other London that artist Bob and Roberta Smith suggested looking at Mekas’ work for inspiration. Although I wasn’t able to make anything from that footage (here’s one of the failed edits) – it did lead me down the path of studying YouTube vlogs more closely which then, via a meandering route, led to my ongoing series of Walking Vlogs that has been running for 3 and-a-half years now.

Jonas Mekas – A Walk (1990)

I shot a new ‘walking vlog’ yesterday – attempting to follow the footsteps of the characters from Patrick Keiller’s seminal film London – on their first walk, from Vauxhall to Strawberry Hill. I shot this in the style I make all my walking videos, on the hoof, talking to camera as I walk, grabbing quick hand-held cutaways as I go, placing the experience of the walk ahead of the necessities of film-making – a style that Iain Sinclair described as ‘grunge Keiller’ (back in 2005). Stylistically this is about as far away from Keiller’s studied locked off 35mm cinematography and beautifully crafted and delivered commentary as you can get. But it’s a style that works for me. Keiller had screened his early short films of London at the London Film-makers’ Co-op (Stonebridge Park and Norwood) – a further link between these worlds. It’s a pleasant surprise that this urge to write about online video making and culture (partly instigated by the brilliant Shane Dwason series on Jake Paul) has led me in this direction – back to some of my original film-making influences at the confluence of my interest in and study of London.

I started making this film around a year ago, with a shoot walking around the Canada Estate with the brilliant Barry Ducket. Straight away I knew we had a film right there. The aim was to make a documentary celebrating the work of Tenants and Residents Associations in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. We wanted to tell a positive story about the communities based on the area’s council estates. This is a community with a proud working class heritage, borne of its relationship to the docks, the tanneries, and other industries that flourished along this section of the Thames. But it’s an area, like the rest of London, that is experiencing enormous change, most obviously symbolised by the building of the Shard. However, perhaps an even more potent symbol is the construction of a block of 100% council flats by Leathermarket CBS on the Kipling Estate, right in the shadow of the Shard. And that story of hope sits at the heart of this film. If they can build council flats there, we can build genuinely affordable socially owned council homes anywhere.

Here’s a selection of images and reactions from Twitter taken at the premiere of my new film In the Shadow of the Shard, made with community activists and organisers in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe. The screening at the magnificient Magdalen Hall, organised by Leathermarket JMB, was followed by a lively panel discussion that included local MP Neil Coyle and Southwark’s Chair of Housing, Johnson Situ, alongside members of the community. There was a really honest and open exchange of views. Details of further screenings below.

There are two further free community screenings followed by a panel discussion

This Sunday sees the premiere of the documentary I’ve been working on with tenants and residents in Bermondsey and Rotherhithe over the last year. The film grew out of my interest in Leathermarket TMO building a block of new 100% Council flats on the Kipling Estate, right in the shadow of the Shard. In the context of the London housing crisis, this was an incredible story on its own, bucking every trend we are told dictates the shape of housing in our city. But initial conversations with the people involved in this amazing project revealed that there was a bigger picture in the old London Borough of Bermondsey. The area is a thriving hub of deep-rooted commnity activism, and the film takes us to meet some of those dedicated people working to keep the spirit of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe alive in the face of enormous change.

Just under a year after the premiere of our film, London Overground, Iain Sinclair mentioned joining him out on the road again with my camera. This time he was walking a section of Watling Street, the Roman road said to have much older origins, in the company of the great film-maker Andrew Kötting, from Canterbury to London. I joined them one morning along Shooters Hill Road in South London where they were accompanied by artist Anne Caron-Delion. This first walk followed the road to Westminster (another branch goes across London Bridge to the City) – passing over Blackheath, through Deptford (the ‘deep ford’), New Cross, Peckham, Elephant and Castle, along the way.

Enroute Iain had mentioned a second passage that related to Watling Street but branching off from Shooters Hill to take in the Shrewsbury burial mound and follow cult author Steve Moore’s ‘psychic circuit’ down to Woolwich. This brings Alan Moore into the story and led to a second walk. Steve Moore had been Alan Moore’s mentor, teaching him both the arts of magick and comic book writing. Alan had celebrated Steve’s territory of Shooters Hill in an essay published in London, City of Disappearances, entitled Unearthing. This seemed like the perfect title to appropriate as the title for the film.

The film that I made from the two walks ‘on and off’ Watling Street with Iain Sinclair was premiered at an event at Kino-Teatr in St Leonards-on-Sea last October, where Andrew Kötting also premiered his film of the whole walk, A WALK BACK TO THE LAST LONDON BY WAY OF WATLING STREET.

The event was called, Lights Out for the Last London: Down Watling Street with Iain Sinclair, Andrew Kotting and John Rogers.

“To pull away from its gravity, he sets off on a Watling Street pilgrimage with long term collaborators (and filmmakers) Andrew Kötting and John Rogers.
Their adventures, told through differing and contradictory memories, become a live performance, a conversation, a film of record.
The collision at Kino-Teatr in St Leonards is a unique coming together for the three walkers. Anything could happen.”

The video above captures the discussion with Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting after the screenings.

New dates announced

Join John Rogers as he ventures out into an uncharted London like a redbrick Indiana Jones in search of the lost meaning of our metropolitan existence. Nursing two reluctant knees and a can of Stella, he perambulates through the seasons seeking adventure in our city’s remote and forgotten reaches. Reviews ‘We’d rather think of him... Continue reading...